beautiful feelings

“beautiful feelings” – more themes

This is about my forthcoming book "beautiful feelings of sensitive people".

It is a question whether there is any influential person in the present time, or one whose ideas I should be reporting. I began thinking about this while looking at copies of Poetry Review which I had acquired in order to read up their reviews. I had an issue from 2008 and the feel was of reviewers discussing works by influential people and being deferential to them, and artistic stimuli not being much present or decisive. So I don’t discuss anybody influential in my book... I was wondering if any of these people, working at the TLS or at famous publishers, actually have any influence, apart from the obvious one of pressuring people to be more conformist. But that leaves out the issue of people being influential by the quality of their ideas, and not because they have a job which gives them patronage. (Or because they have a seat on the board of the Poetry Society and have the power to fire or appoint editors of Poetry Review.)

I think one of the prominent features of the 21st century scene is that there are no influential figures. It could be that there are people influential within particular cells of poetry and it is a question of isolating cells small enough for this power to be detectible. Comments below grope towards identifying two figures who did influence and convince people: Lumsden and Berry.

There is a review by Fiona Moore in a 2016 issue of PR talking about the “Best British poems 2015” anthology (edited by Emily Berry) which correctly points out that there is a shared Tendency in the poems chosen (like, 10 out of 71, maybe) towards erotic poems by women, and that this is related to a tendency in the USA called gurlesque and indeed that this idea was mediated by Roddy Lumsden, who pointed out to various poets that this was a workable idea. The name relates to “burlesque”, which in US theatre talk means not “comic/ parodic” but “striptease”. The poets involved are not actually girls, that too is a word which involves innuendo. I dedicate a whole chapter to the poets in that anthology and it was the dropping of inhibitions which struck me. Of course, what the inhibitions were driving off stage is very complex and unfamiliar, and trying to confine it to a single idea is misleading. Googling “lumsden + gurlesque” produces 4 hits, although there are many more hits which do not show the two words within one sentence. It shows Amy Key saying “Five years ago I pitched an essay to the editors of a new edition of Gurlesque – an anthology of women poets that was central to Roddy Lumsden’s teachings. I wanted to use the essay to highlight Roddy’s incredible influence on a generation of UK poets. [...]The updated edition of the anthology however, never seems to have happened, so for what its worth I’m publishing it here, because this story is really important to me. The writing in the essay is a bit awkward and I wouldn’t write it in the same way now – its almost five years old – but I’ve left it as is.“ The US anthology came out in 2010, was edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, and featured Chelsey Minnis. When Kay says “generation” I think she means maybe 2% of an age group, and the distinction between “generation” and “tiny cell” is one I especially want to bring out. “Back in London, Roddy ran two weekly poetry workshops. In one of his classes, sometime in 2006, he introduced three poets totally unknown to everyone in the room: Chelsey Minnis, Brenda Shaughnessy and Matthea Harvey. He told us these poets were loosely known as ‘gurlesque’ writers. I can’t remember who was in the room, but around this time a few of the names I mention above were in this group with me. It was common for the poems Roddy brought to class to be taken apart—this happened most often when we were looking at work from UK poets, ones that might be defined as mainstream." So first we hear “generation” and now it’s one poetry class in an institute doing evening classes in Covent Garden, London. It does occur to me that there is a country outside London. This looks like a significant transmission process, Lumsden did something notable even if he hadn't invented the idea and didn’t have the skill to write poems in that style. I am doubtful about the firmness of the link between "gurlesque" and the majority of poems in Berry's anthology. However, it would seem that both Berry and Lumsden are influential figures, and that biographies of their opinions would be of value in telling the big story.
I am facing the possibility that there might be 100 identifiable cells and that I would have to crawl through a lot of detailed evidence to identify the influences which flowed into the cell, or also flowed outwards from it. To be honest, I think it is better to deal with particular books close-up and leave out the question of what they are sequential to.
I don’t like the word Gurlesque, it is too close to striptease, but I would go for the word “derepression”; that is the long-term thing, continuously since the 1960s, and it has given us, not just a landscape with thousands of poets, but also a bewildering range of styles. If people are not conformist, then tracking influences is relatively unproductive and frustrating. That 2015 anthology gives generous space to the chosen poets to comment, and none of them mentions Gurlesque, or anything like it. I found an interview with Berry about the anthology which also does not mention Gurlesque. I am grateful to Fiona Moore for pointing out (in her review) the context, and for observing that the editor of the series in which Berry’s anthology appeared was Roddy Lumsden.

I think someone can become influential by first of all recognising that there is no avenue for being influential on a large scale. Once they accept that the “cell” is the largest unit in which they can change the melody, they can be effective. Diversity of taste has discredited the older critics of poetry, who set up a rigid ideal and became significant because they owned it. That makes you look authoritative, whereas if you recognise diversity as the sound of the time, you appear not to know anything of any value. All the same, the credible critics or experts are the ones who accept diversity, that is the small size of any nameable patch. John Berger is the most tyrannical and irrational critic I can think of, someone charged up with the Stalinism of the 1950s. There were others, too. But it is hard to think of anyone like that operating today, and in fact there has been a shortage of Authority figures emerging since the 1970s. People don’t want to hear that kind of aggressive tone. I link it with territoriality; someone like Berger thought they owned the landscape, and that enabled them to lay down the law. I suspect that it works in two ways, that the great range of creativity today is possible because people like that have fled into the wilderness, and that the diversity also disproves any rigid and generalising theory, and discredits the would-be Commissars.
Lumsden included notes on the 85 poets in his 2010 anthology ‘Identity Parade’. The notes are really bland and passive, tending to reproduce the poet's publicity lines rather than stating anything precise. Even though he admits to copying the model of Lucie-Smith's anthology, he has none of Lucie-Smith’s ability to sum poets up. Obviously there are benefits from not being exact and analytical. In the end, you could learn from Lucie-Smith how modern poetry works, but there is nobody you can learn that from today. Lucie-Smith was a connoisseur and Lumsden was just a facilitator. The possibility of making a living these days comes from teaching writing classes and workshops, and that role works much better if you are passive and receptive. Encouraging students and not imposing any dogma on them. I think this is now the default style of “experts”, and you can have many people being very grateful to a former teacher without subscribing to any position which they stood for. This is something to emphasise….you have plenty of people who are friendly and amenable to ideas, who want to be liked and whom you end up liking. I don’t know how to paint a picture of this, but it is certainly why you have the scene being mobbed with people who want to be poets. Also, the key ideas don't have owners.

In the book I talk about Anthony Mellors’ use of Wilhelm Müller's poem “Der Leiermann”, set to music by Schubert. I was also impressed, just now, by the use of Donovan's song “Hurdy gurdy Man” as the ominous soundtrack music to a key murder scene in David Fincher’s film “Zodiac”. Leier is a hurdy gurdy, obviously. In Donovan's lyric (to this distorted, intense, rotating psychedelic song) he talks also of “roly poly roly poly roly poly man”. I saw a reference a few days ago to a roly poly landscape. Aha – it refers to something rolling (not just to someone carrying a lot of fat). The ‘roly’ must refer to the handle of the hurdy gurdy being turned round and round. This is what causes the strings to vibrate.

Maybe, if I collected stories from 100 different poetry writing classes, I would have the history of poetry in the last 20 years. And that would be Success. OK, maybe I am doing the wrong kind of work. But I don't think ONE story from ONE writing class is the story of a generation.

“The RED CANDLE PRESS, Britain’s longest established formalist poetry press, was founded in 1970 by Dale Gunthorp and M. L. McCarthy, without financial capital but young and feisty enough to take on the intolerant and dictatorial prose-gone-mad poetry Establishment - it really was the Establishment then - on behalf of verse and sanity.” (ML is “Len”, apparently.) I read this website in 2023 so it seems they are still going 50 years later. (More looking digs up “After the October 2010 issue of the magazine, publication of Candelabrum was suspended indefinitely.”, but the press is still going.) It is striking that people who reject modernity do not boast about being conservative and reactionary. Not just here, they always present themselves as rebels. If you are still a beleaguered minority after 50 years, it may be that you are simply unresponsive to modern art, as opposed to being about to bring about its final defeat and exit from the scene. This group may represent 0.1% of the scene, or even less than that.

A problem has emerged in the shape of a curve. The figures I have (from forays into the British Library catalogue) have the following percentages for women poets (of single-author collections):

2000 38.4%
2010 36.1%
2019 41.9%

The expected upward drift is not there. Evidently the percentage was rising during the Nineties:
1990 29.5%
1995 32.2%

but, on this quite extensive evidence, it has also seized up after the new century started. I was really surprised to see this. I would have expected the movement to stall, not at 50%, but somewhere in the 50s. I can do another crawl-through of the data, but I can't see corrections affecting this basic contour. Of course the basic catalogue entries give you names and you have to guess what the gender is, which leaves a region of uncertainty, perhaps 2% of the names. One can look these up one by one and resolve some fraction of them, but that is very tedious. Anyway, the percentages do not shift much if you carry out that exercise.
I can’t interpret this curve. I analysed the titles listed by the Poetry Book Society, for a 5 year period 2017 to 2022, and in that set 55% of the poets were women. I also can't analyse why this is different from the ratio in the complete data (which in theory would include also Bad Poets).
A question would be whether the increase of women poets has meant a decrease of male poets. No, because the overall count of titles has increased steeply and so both shares have been growing at the same time. It follows that 40% in 2019 actually means more poets than 40% in 2000. However, it is surprising that the moment of “50% of poets publishing are women” does not seem to be close.

It is interesting to compile these spreadsheets and work through them, cleaning up the data. The titles give you a glimpse of how the poet sees the poetic world. Aesthetic response is based on actually reading the poems, and I would probably not know more than 4% of these poets. They number in thousands. Looking at the whole mass of poets gives you a different perspective. It may be that you would find two radically different histories if you looked at "4000 poets earnestly publishing" and "200 effective and ambitious poets", and you could write two different books about them.

Roddy Lumsden (1966-2020)

Roddy Lumsden (1966-2020)
I was saddened to hear of the death of Roddy Lumsden, in January this year. He was 53. One obituary speaks of cirrhosis of the liver, so this may have been a consequence of the traditional Scottish diet. He said in interview that he had read 350 books to compile Identity Parade (his 2010 anthology of debuts roughly from 1993 on) so the combination of workaholism and this may give us something of the tune. Both speak of excess, of a refusal to believe that the cave stretching under the sea doesn't come out into daylight at the other end.

He has been described as a “trivia genius” and seems to have had a passion for quizzes and puzzles. Possibly this began with a kind of pub games machine that asked you quiz questions and would actually pay out money if you got enough of them right. This was possibly a source of funding for many unemployed autodidacts in the era of Thatcherism, when nobody had a job. Anyway, he published a book of obscure quiz questions (Vitamin Q: a temple of trivia lists and curious words) and may have derived income from quiz questions throughout his career. Inspector Rebus began as a puzzle solver– the name means a kind of puzzle (in pictures), and the first Rebus book is ‘Knots and Crosses’, a set of puzzles. I like to think of a pub, in Edinburgh, sometime in the 70s, when Lumsden and Rebus took part in the same pub quiz.

He is said to have published ten books of poems, although to be honest I haven't read any of them.

I was impressed by Identity Parade and wanted to interview Lumsden for our magazine, Angel Exhaust. My co-editor, Charles Bainbridge, was against it, on the grounds that Lumsden would be too cautious to say anything useful. I expect that is right, based on the prose in IP. IP describes Lucie-Smith's 1970 anthology of British Poetry since 1945 in the introduction. This sets the bar incredibly high, but does tacitly make the point that IP was the first anthology since Lucie-Smith to undertake a survey of the entire span of British poetry. It exposes a problem, that Lucie-Smith wrote pieces of incredibly focused prose about each of 86 poets (one more than Identity Parade) and Lumsden was unable to do that – his little intros say what the poet wants to hear about themselves but don’t start on classification and description. He says that "this may be the generation least driven by movements, fashions, conceptual and stylistic sharing", but this may really mean that there are lots of conventions but he is not analytical enough to identify them and write them down. This is "hegemony". It is conventional to judge writers by the quality of their critique – Lumsden didn’t have a critique. However, it is also possible to say that poets want warmth and softness. How bad is that – a kind editor who doesn’t try to separate poets on the basis of the size of their talent! Some social media postings refer to him “influencing hundreds of poets”; that is unlikely, and may mean “interacted in workshops with hundreds of poets”, but it points to the value of being nice to people. It may be we should set Lumsden down as “a great workshop convener”, and although that is novel language it may be the truth in this case. Lucie-Smith was the convener of “The Group”, a prototype workshop in the 1960s where the poets actually criticised each other. I think generous enthusiasm is all people aspire to in the modern convention, although that is probably not going to make you a better poet. The face to face world is essentially different from the world of thought, but it is necessary to the poetic process. There are people who are self-aware enough to listen to articulate criticism of their poems and turn it round and write better poems in the following years, but I think a lot of people are not so rational at all and the value to them of hearing criticism is questionable. A lot of sensitive people have high anxiety levels and anything which reduces their anxiety, soft words for example, will open up the way for them to write more poems.

He speaks of the two traditions (“Within IP, the reader will find poems from both the conventional and innovative styles, and which take their influence from both traditions at once”). Two? Lucie-Smith divides his poets into ten sections. This is probably more productive – two may not be the right number. L-S throws his poets into their projects – exposing the risk and artificiality of what each one is doing, the need to create artificial rules in order to create original poetry. Naturally failure is an aspect of these bold and fragile worlds. Lumsden bypasses all that. I am not convinced that he understood the “alternative tradition”, but my suspicion is that it takes many years to reach that understanding, partly because the language around it is so cryptic and hostile and unhelpful, and that the critics who do come to understand it do so by neglecting every other part of the spectrum.

An anthology called the Salt book of younger poets is possibly even better than Identity Parade. Note that he did the one based on reading 350 books in 2010 and this set of 50 poets, none of whom had a book out, the year after. This is a high work rate (SYP was co-edited with Eloise Stonborough, so maybe she did most of the work. OK, I don't have a view on that. But it still looks like two major anthologies in two years.) Finding poets who haven’t done a book means diving into a pathless underworld of little magazines, student websites, unpublished typescripts, rejected typescripts… it is heroic. Anyone willing to swim in that river, most of which is work so bad it deserves to be lost, is stalwart. Like Rebus in Niddrie.

The introduction to IP says that the “field”, of debuts between 1993 and about 2009, was a thousand names. This is accurate. Reading 350 books was already selective! I think you have to deal with this by saying "anybody I have never read may be Utterly Brilliant". Nothing else will do.

The same introduction says that the characteristic of the poetry under consideration is "the self-exploration of individualism", and that very little of it was political. I think this is problematic as a characterisation of poets born in the 1960s (this is roughly what the field is) and the truth is that “pluralism” (p.20) has no descriptive power at all. All the same, diversity is the right diagnosis. Some people are less diverse than others. The idea that everyone is excitedly exploring is belied by the contents, where most of the poets are very similar and clearly wary of originality, as an enemy of empathy and group solidarity. It is vital that Lumsden includes genuinely diverse poets, like Helen Macdonald and DS Marriott. As for politics, my guess is that he is expressing what he loves and believes in even as he is denying what the poets are interested in. So, it is not plausible that all the poets who write poems about feminism or the need for Green policies were apolitical: “Overall, political poetry has been scarce since then [1993], and much of it is ineffective, unconvincing.” I mean, the green thing involves the end of profits for most corporations, the end of fossil fuels, the end of aviation and private cars – it is anti-capitalist and you just can’t see this as apolitical. Feminism too, is asking for a change of every cell of society. And you probably couldn't find even one female poet who would admit to not being a feminist. But opinions are divisive, and Lumsden is trying to isolate a feeling of togetherness by effacing differences. This is really a consistent strategy, not an omission. He is more interested in the poet's feelings than in what they have feelings about. As for the poet descriptions in IP, they do give the titles of publication and how the poets want to be seen, and that takes them a long way. No critique, no analysis – that leaves a whole range of other cognitive tactics. Maybe Lumsden could read 350 books (without going completely numb) because he was genuinely fascinated by (mediocre?) poets and willing to open up to every new poet, however many times he had been disappointed.